AUSTRALIA
North Queensland Register
DAVID MARR
George Pell’s parish was the big end of town. He let Melbourne know the church was not afraid of power. He exercised his own with a freedom unimaginable to a politician. He didn’t need to win hearts or votes. He had no board to please or party to keep onside. He answered only to Rome. He was the prince of Catholic Melbourne.
Despite protests from historians, he shifted a century-old statue of Daniel O’Connell from the forecourt of St Patrick’s Cathedral and put in its place an immense bronze of Daniel Mannix. Cost: $100,000. He built a mini-Vatican around the cathedral to house new church offices, a seminary, a campus for the Australian Catholic University and the headquarters of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. Cost: $30 million. He was always a big spender. Pell brought a climate of fear to Melbourne. As books were banned, jobs lost and careers blocked, his critics became cautious. More and more they spoke to the press off the record. Pell could swat such anonymous criticism away effortlessly. He had an agenda and he got his way. If he didn’t, he could become incandescent with rage.
Pell has a fundamental faith that sexuality is malleable, that spiritual exercises can stop sex in its tracks or even change its direction. This is the ground on which he has built his commitment to celibacy, his intolerance of homosexuality, his insistence that the sex rules of Rome be obeyed and his belief (certainly at that time) that even paedophiles can be redeemed by grace and with skilled psychological assistance.
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